HAHR readers interested in the history of Brazil since the establishment of the Old Republic in 1889 will probably already be familiar with Helio Silva’s contemporary documentary history series, entitled the “Vargas Cycle,” in which twelve volumes have already appeared. The two volumes under review are numbers eleven and twelve, respectively, and Silva plans to keep them coming until he brings us up to the present.
This is a most prodigious enterprise—one which has occupied the author for a period of some 40 years, since he first served as secretary to the bancada paulista (São Paulo delegation) in the Constituent Assembly called by Getúlio Vargas in 1934, four years after his successful takeover of the government. Silva was thus at the center of the vortex of Brazilian politics for a time, and the political associations he made then stood him in good stead later, when he began collecting documentary materials (including private papers and interviews) for subsequent publication in this series. His acknowledgments read like a “Who’s Who” of recent Brazilian leaders, thereby lending authenticity to the undertaking.
In a multi-volume set of historical volumes it is well-nigh unavoidable that the quality varies considerably from volume to volume, unless the author or editor has at his command a battery of researchers and writers in the best encyclopedia style. Silva refers to a small group that he is in the process of training, but, with the exception of his coresearcher and author on these two volumes, Maria Cecília Ribas Carneiro, he does not tell us who they are or what they have contributed to the final result.
It may be that these volumes improve the closer they get to the contemporary period. The last volume, for example, is clearly an improvement in organization, style, and interpretation over its predecessors, even though Silva repeats his unhappy habit of quoting lengthy documents in extenso in the body of the text rather than giving us a precis of their contents and reproducing them in full in a supplementary section.
These volumes trace the intricate web of Brazil’s relations with the Axis powers and the United States spun by her leaders—especially Vargas, foreign minister Oswaldo Aranha, and military chief-of-staff General Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro—in the years immediately preceding and following U.S. entry into World War II. Silva and Ribas Cameiro make clear that among the most crucial factors militating in favor of joint U.S.-Brazilian leadership in Western Hemisphere solidarity were: (1) the personal friendship between Roosevelt and Vargas and the high quality of their personal leadership; (2) the strong initiatives taken by Aranha, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles; (3) Nazi efforts to win the loyalty of German immigrant communities in Brazil; (4) Nazi sinkings of Brazilian shipping; and last, but by no means least, American commitments to supply military equipment and finance the Volta Redonda steel-making facility.
Reading of these brilliant responses by American and Brazilian leaders to the challenges of global war makes us profoundly nostalgic for men of such calibre to lead us today.
